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The frail boy was lying flat on the kitchen floor by the sink.
There was no sign that he was breathing or that his heart was
beating.
He was disturbingly thin. The first rescue workers to arrive
at the modest ranch house thought they were looking at an AIDS
victim, or perhaps a child undergoing chemotherapy. Only a few
tufts of hair sprouted from his nearly bald head.
The mother of the stricken 7-year-old was trying to administer
CPR, but she was pushing on his abdomen, not his chest. A telephone
receiver was on the kitchen floor, the line open to the county
emergency center.
The mother had called 911 at 12:22 p.m., and help arrived 10
minutes later. Soon the house was swarming with medical technicians
and state troopers. The boy, dressed in a shirt and sweat pants
with a diaper underneath, was taken by ambulance at 1:10 p.m.
to the Hunterdon County Medical Center, 10 miles away.
As the ambulance was preparing to leave, the mother swore at
the police officers still there and ordered them off her property.
She chose not to ride in the ambulance, but went to the hospital
about 15 minutes later with her husband, who had been at Sunday
church services with their six other children.
In the emergency room, doctors and nurses were able to restore
the child's heartbeat, but his condition was critical. The decision
was made to transfer him by helicopter that afternoon to Robert
Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.
Doctors there noted that the boy, Viktor Alexander Matthey,
was covered with 40 cuts, scrapes and bruises. The skin on his
right hand was bright red, from his wrist to his fingertips.
Three bones in that hand were broken, and there was evidence
of an earlier, untreated fracture.
He also was in an advanced state of hypothermia; his body temperature,
recorded as 83.2 degrees at the emergency room in Hunterdon,
had dropped to 80 by the time he reached Robert Wood Johnson.
There he was put on life support in an intensive care unit while
his family prayed for his recovery.
Two days later, on Oct. 31, 2000, the boy died.
A week after that, Bob and Brenda Matthey, a deeply religious
couple who 10 months earlier had adopted Viktor Sergeyevich
Tulimov in Russia and given him their name, were charged with
his death.
Hunterdon County authorities said that before he died, the Mattheys'
adopted son had been imprisoned in an unheated, unlit and damp
pump room, off the basement, when the temperature outside got
down to 37.
Put simply, the child from Siberia had died in the cold of America.
More than 16,000 children born in foreign countries - including
5,000 from Russia - were adopted by Americans in 1999, the year
the Mattheys journeyed to eastern Siberia and adopted Viktor
and his younger twin brothers, Vladimir and Yevgeniy.
The cost of adopting from overseas can be considerable. It is
not unusual to spend $10,000 to $15,000 for a single child -
to process documents, to travel to the country where the child
is, to pay fees to the lawyers and adoption agencies.
In the vast majority of adoptions, a simple goal is achieved:
A family in search of a child is united with a child in need
of a family.
Sometimes, however, things don't work as planned. Some children
have suffered in their early years, abused by birth parents
and sent to institutions where the care is less than nurturing.
Often they carry psychological scars that make adjusting to
their new homes extraordinarily trying, for them and for their
well-meaning but ill-prepared adoptive parents. As a result,
some child psychologists now specialize in treating dysfunctional
children who were adopted overseas.
There was no sign that Bob and Brenda Matthey had anything but
Christian charity in their hearts when they came home from Russia
with Viktor and his 4-year-old twin brothers just before Christmas
in 1999. Already the parents of four boys, the Mattheys - Bob
was 36, Brenda 34 - had decided God wanted them to adopt a foreign
child in need of a good home.
Viktor certainly was that. One of six siblings taken from neglectful,
alcoholic parents in 1997, he had been in two orphanages over
21⁄2 years. When the Mattheys came to his orphanage to
briefly meet him for the first time, Viktor was told they would
be his new "forever" parents. As the Mattheys prepared
to leave, Viktor began to cry, believing he had failed to please
them. The Mattheys assured him they would be back, and days
later he and two of his brothers were on their way to a new
American home.
If there were serious problems in the Mattheys' house in Union
Township, they were not apparent from the outside. The family's
life centered on a Pentecostal church that taught that the answers
to most problems could be found in the Bible. They did not socialize
with their neighbors. None of the children attended public schools;
the biological children were home-schooled until they were sent
to a Bible school in September 2000.
How Viktor adapted to his new life undoubtedly will be an issue
at the Mattheys' eventual trial. Relatives say he picked up
English quickly, enjoyed playing on the backyard trampoline
and riding a bicycle; the family's pastor says he embraced Christ.
Lawyers representing his adoptive parents are likely to paint
a much different picture of Viktor, one that portrays a maladjusted,
self-destructive little boy whose many injuries were his own
doing.
It is now a year since Viktor died, and no date has been set
for the Mattheys' trial. They were indicted in March on charges
of aggravated manslaughter, endangering the welfare of a child
and witness-tampering. And no one - not the dueling lawyers,
not adoption officials in Russia or the United States, not the
boy's birth mother in Siberia or his adoptive grandmother in
America, not his teachers in a Siberian orphanage, not even
the Mattheys' pastor - no one claims to fully understand why
this adoption ended in tragedy.
It is far easier to pinpoint when events were set in motion.
The story begins in a New Jersey church.
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